A woman’s voice sliced through the air. “What are you doing, Seb?”
“She has a knife,” Seb said quickly, stepping away. He didn’t stay to help either of them, backing into the shadows instead, and Sin made sure to keep watching him out of the corner of her eye even as she turned to face the real threat.
The woman was tall and lean, muscled in a way Sin would like to be one day, when she had more time to work on her routines. She came toward Sin in a series of spare, efficient movements, a sword burning magic in each hand.
“Got a knife, have you?” she asked. “I’m armed myself.”
The reach of those swords was going to be a real problem. Sin looked at her knife, measured her chances, and feinted. When the woman checked herself and looked for a knife that wasn’t coming, Sin threw the knife from a different angle.
The swordswoman was just a hair too fast. She got a sword up to deflect the knife. Sin had thrown hard, and the sword flew from the woman’s hand, but that left her with one weapon and Sin with none.
None that this magician knew about. Sin wasn’t about to tip the woman off about the knife at her ankle.
She waited for a chance to duck and make it look natural, which meant standing there empty-handed as the woman advanced on her.
“Cynthia Davies, I think? My name is Helen,” the woman said. “The Market’s in your hands, in the absence”—her lip curled—“of your leader. Care to surrender it to me?”
“Come and take it,” Sin told her.
Helen ran at her and Sin waited, waited, and threw herself to the ground, curled up in a ball with her hand finally at her ankle as the sword came hurtling down toward her head and—
Stopped.
Sin grasped her knife, and only then looked up.
There was an orange line over her head, drawn on the night sky like a line beneath a sentence. The sword had hit it and stopped.
Helen was staring at a point beyond Sin. Sin followed her line of sight, expecting to see that boy Seb.
Instead she saw her sister. Lydie, running into the fray with both her hands thrown up as if she had a shield in them.
Alan was behind her, limping far more obviously than he usually did, trying to catch up with her. He had Toby in the crook of one arm and his gun trained on Helen. Helen wasn’t looking at him. She had her eyes on Lydie and she was retreating, lowering her sword.
It was the worst possible thing she could have done.
There were a dozen Market people and pipers coming up behind her, Mae and Matthias among them, and all of them saw what Helen was doing.
They saw the magician refuse to fight one of her own kind.
Helen surveyed the new opposition over her shoulder, and then looked back to see Nick appear at Alan’s side. There was fresh blood running down his sword.
“Time to go,” Helen called out.
Matthias’s bow was already strung. He let fly an arrow directly at Helen, who turned with a sweep of her sword and disappeared in a wash of shimmering light, as if she was only the reflection of a woman in a pool and someone had drawn a hand through the water.
The magicians gone, they were left standing and staring at one another. The air was full of smoke and the smell of blood.
“So,” said Phyllis, drawing her dressing gown shut. “There’s a magician among us.”
Matthias had not put his bow away.
Sin backed up, knife in hand, until she bumped up against Lydie, felt Lydie’s small, frantic hands clinging to Sin’s belt loops.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Sin. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, baby,” Sin told her, then lifted her voice and spun her knife so that the Market people could not mistake her meaning. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Sin,” said Carl, who was draped with half the weapons from his stall, a broadsword in each hand. “She’s a magician.”
“She’s mine.”
“Think a little, Cynthia,” Carl said, coaxing. “If she can do that at seven, what’ll she do at sixteen when the power really comes in? You know what she’ll do. You know she’ll be one of them.”
Sin saw Mae make a small, angry movement, but there was nothing Mae could say: The whole Goblin Market had seen her brother join the magicians. They always went to their own kind, in the end.
“The issue could be shelved until she is sixteen,” Alan said softly behind Sin. “Now is hardly the time to fight among ourselves.”
“Now is hardly the time for divided loyalties!” Phyllis said, her voice crackling like old wood in a fire. “Iris is dead! We’re not keeping a magician in the nest. It’s not like this is the first time Sin has failed us. She would’ve sacrificed us all for the sake of that baby, last time. It’s not like we don’t have another choice.”
Everyone looked at Mae. Mae lifted her chin, glaring back at them.
“My brother’s a magician too.”
“A lot of us have magicians in the family,” Phyllis said. “And the magicians all left.”
Mae took a deep breath. “I don’t want the leadership like this.”
“But you would step up and take it if you had to,” Phyllis said. “You wouldn’t abandon the Market. That’s what we’re saying. It’s Sin’s duty to send the child away.”
Phyllis had known Sin and Lydie since they were born. Carl too. These were her people, the Market people, closer than an ordinary family, bound together by danger and a common cause.
Sin was amazed by how little that seemed to matter.
She was even more amazed when Matthias the piper, who she had never liked much or trusted for anything but a song at sunset, unstrung his bow with an abrupt motion and said, “Sin’s not abandoning the Market. Throwing ourselves into the arms of a girl we’ve known a couple of months is insane.”
“I have an idea,” Alan said. “If she would agree to leave the girl with magicians—”
“No!” Sin snarled, wheeling on him.
Alan stood with his gun lowered at his side. His eyes were fixed on her, intent and just for a moment, pleading. She knew him well enough by now to know when he was role-playing.
She could stay at the Market with Toby. He’d keep Lydie until they could get something figured out.
All it would take was Sin convincing the Market that she would abandon Lydie. In front of her sister.
No, no, not in a thousand years, even though she loved him for trying, not in the light or the darkness, not for any reason. Lydie could not be allowed to doubt, ever.
“She’s mine,” Sin repeated.
Alan lied more easily than he told the truth, but she was a performer: She knew there was always a choice between lies and truth, that it was a balancing act. Alan might not know what was too important to lie about. She did.
Carl looked away, at the ground. Elka covered her mouth with the back of her hand. None of them spoke up when Phyllis stepped forward.
She said, “You are not welcome back here. Not ever.”
Sin had banished Alan from the Market like this, three months ago.
She looked at Mae, who was biting her lip and still looking angry. Sin could tell them all about Mae’s messenger’s earrings, about Mae’s demon’s mark. She knew she could create enough uncertainty to get Mae banished too.
“My brother’s a magician,” Mae said, before Sin could say a word. “If she has to leave, I’ll leave too.”
But that would leave the Market with no-one.
“Phyllis is right. Your brother’s gone,” Sin told Mae. “I’m keeping my sister.”
Sin bowed her head, turning to the urgent grasp of Lydie’s hands. She bent down and scooped her up. Lydie wasn’t so heavy, and her thin arms went around Sin’s neck so tight Sin thought she could have hung on all by herself.
Sin turned her back on the Market and leaned her cheek against Lydie’s hair, looking out at the spread of London at night, thousands of lights like the glittering points of knives.
Alan spoke again, quietly this time and not trying to persuade anyone. His voice was still lovely.
“You can come home with us.”
7
Lie to Me
ALAN AND NICK WERE LIVING IN A BLOCK OF FLATS IN WILLESDEN. Nobody was speaking in the car as they drove, and the kids fell asleep on either side of Sin. Sin felt tired enough to fall asleep herself, but she had to think.
The Tube station at Willesden Green was only six streets away. She could still get Lydie to school. Thank God Lydie and Toby were both dressed warmly. Sin curled up to sit on her cold feet and tried to calculate how long the money Dad had given her would last. She was going to have to buy shoes.
By the time they parked, it had started raining.
“Nick,” Alan said in a meaningful tone.
“I can carry you,” Nick told Sin flatly.
Sin raised her eyebrows, making sure they both caught her expression in the mirror. “I’d rather walk.”
She shook Lydie, not too hard, so Lydie was just wakeful enough to stumble along with Sin’s hand on her back and not enough to start panicking. She left Toby zonked out and drooling on her shirt.
Nick strode on ahead, possibly not thrilled by Alan offering their home as a refuge to three strays.
“We won’t stay long,” Sin told Alan in a hushed voice.
Alan, bereft of any current opportunity to help someone, had already got out his keys. He was looking at them and not at her, so Sin looked away at the reflections of streetlights glinting on the wet pavement.
“You can stay as long as you like.”
His voice was as warm and certain as it had been on the hill, just for her, but when she glanced up he was still looking at his keys.
“The kids can have my bed,” Nick offered, his voice abrupt. Sin would have thought he was being kind if he had not added pointedly to Alan, making it clear where his concerns lay: “You sleep in yours.”
“Of course,” Sin said, before Alan could respond. “Thank you.”
Lydie blinked in the fluorescent lights of the hall and the lift, looking bleary and lost. Sin shifted Toby so she could offer Lydie her hand, and her sister grabbed onto it, small fingers tugging Sin insistently down with every step, as if Sin was a balloon that might float away from her.
Alan lived up on the top floor. There was a walkway to their door, with a wire mesh instead of a fourth wall. The wind and rain blew through it at them, and the cement beneath Sin’s feet was rough and wet.
When Alan opened the door and flicked on the light, the wooden floors looked yellow as butter. There were battered cardboard boxes full of books in the narrow hallway and beyond that a little kitchen with crumbs on the counter. Sin was profoundly and deeply thankful for this, a roof over her head, somewhere like a home where Lydie and Toby could feel safe.
“Shall I show you your new room?” Alan asked Lydie, offering her his hand, his voice back to being persuasive now, small and tender as Lydie’s clinging fingers.
He held the door of Nick’s room open for them and Lydie went in eagerly, her whole small body aimed like a missile for the rumpled blankets and sheets of the bed. She hit it face-first.
The bed was too narrow for three, and Toby and Lydie needed sleep. Sin tucked them up, murmuring reassurances she was almost certain they were too sleepy to hear. She touched their heads, safe together on one pillow, Lydie’s fine blond hair and the warm round shape of Toby’s scalp beneath his curls. She didn’t let herself do anything else that might wake them up, just rose and slid out of the door to see if she could rob a couch cushion.
Alan and Nick were in the kitchen. Nick was leaning against the kitchen sink, his arms crossed, and Alan was cleaning off the counter.
“—cannot believe you said that,” Alan said.
“It’s simple,” Nick told him, sounding bored. “You’re crippled. So you sleep in a bed.”